Finding resume and restart errors in android applications

Document Type

Conference Proceeding

Publication Date

10-19-2016

Abstract

Smartphone apps create and handle a large variety of "instance" data that has to persist across runs, such as the current navigation route, workout results, antivirus settings, or game state. Due to the nature of the smartphone platform, an app can be paused, sent into background, or killed at any time. If the instance data is not saved and restored between runs, in addition to data loss, partially-saved or corrupted data can crash the app upon resume or restart. While smartphone platforms offer API support for data-saving and data-retrieving operations, the use of this API is ad-hoc: left to the programmer, rather than enforced by the compiler. We have observed that several categories of bugs-including data loss, failure to resume/restart or resuming/restarting in the wrong state-are due to incorrect handling of instance data and are easily triggered by just pressing the 'Home' or 'Back' buttons. To help address this problem, we have constructed a tool chain for Android (the KRE finder static analysis and the KREreproducer input generator) that helps find and reproduce such incorrect handling. We have evaluated our approach by running the static analysis on 324 apps, of which 49 were further analyzed manually. Results indicate that our approach is (i) effective, as it has discovered 49 bugs, including in popular Android apps, and (ii) efficient, completing on average in 61 seconds per app. More generally, our approach helps determine whether an app saves too much or too little state.

Identifier

84995543469 (Scopus)

ISBN

[9781450344449]

Publication Title

Proceedings of the Conference on Object Oriented Programming Systems Languages and Applications OOPSLA

External Full Text Location

https://doi.org/10.1145/2983990.2984011

First Page

864

Last Page

880

Volume

02-04-November-2016

Grant

W911NF-13-2-0045

Fund Ref

Army Research Laboratory

This document is currently not available here.

Share

COinS